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Imagining and Building a New Encyclopedia UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Sum of all knowledge: Wikipedia and the encyclopedic urge Salor, F.E. Publication date 2012 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Salor, F. E. (2012). Sum of all knowledge: Wikipedia and the encyclopedic urge. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:29 Sep 2021 2. Imagining and Building a New Encyclopedia It is quite natural that such developments should seem like marvels and that initially, deeming them to be impossible, the mind should reject any pursuit of them. But, according to a common slogan, do we not live in a time in which yesterday’s utopia is today’s dream and tomorrow’s reality? Paul Otlet Microphotographic Book, 1906 2.1 Introduction The modern encyclopedia, as it existed in the beginning of the 20th century, was the culmination of a continuous evolution that can be traced back to its Enlightenment origins, which in turn was the transformation of a much older ideal. The previous chapter traced the evolution of the encyclopedic form in line with its surrounding cultural, economic and technical environments. Encyclopedias occasionally fell behind the curve, with the continuing use of Medieval works during Renaissance, while sometimes they were the pioneers of new ideas that transformed the rest of the society, famously in the case of the Encyclopédie. At the end of the 19th century, the most notable encyclopedias settled into a matured form and focused their editorial efforts on increasing their breadth and depth, and this is exemplified by acclaimed 9th edition of Britannica. Along with their intellectual ambitions, encyclopedias also become significant business ventures, involving considerable capital investment and marketing budgets. While the struggle to combine the right amount of business acumen with excellence in scholarship has worked very effectively in refining the model, a radical rethinking of the encyclopedic ideal in its entirety would be unlikely to emerge from the offices of any large and established encyclopedia. Still, the beginning of the 20th century witnessed some of the most ambitious ideas concerning the future of encyclopedias from some of the most original and/or seminal thinkers of the period. Others, building upon such ideals and inspired by rapidly advancing 57 technology, expanded their vision of a fundamentally new encyclopedia, among which Wikipedia’s roots can be traced. This chapter aims to bridge the gap between mature modern encyclopedias as they were established at the end of the 19th century, and Wikipedia’s emergence in the beginning of the 21st century. This survey of the 20th century aims to cover two broad and intertwined themes, beginning with the earliest attempts to re-imagine encyclopedic thinking, and follows the works of theorists and science fiction authors. Some of these writers have laid down the foundations of our current understanding of digital technology while others have speculated on a future where culture and knowledge have transcended their existing boundaries. The second theme will focus on the work of pioneering computer scientists and engineers who, throughout the 20th century, built digital computers and the Internet, and directly contributed to the realization of some of the visions outlined in the first section. The central aim of this chapter is therefore to identify the blend of technical innovation and intellectual vision that went into the creation of Wikipedia through a discussion of these two movements and their interplay throughout the 20th century. 2.2 Challenging Print The massive increase in the number of printed books resulting from the proliferation of the printing press across Europe and the intellectual activity it fostered was illustrated in the previous chapter. The modern encyclopedia has come to incorporate a claim to address a perceived need to summarize the expanding body of knowledge that the development of print made possible. This trend can be traced back to Chambers’ claim that his Cyclopaedia was the only book a layperson would ever need and the editorial struggle of Chambers’ successors grew along with the accelerating advance of modern sciences. The result was often an expansion in the size of the encyclopedia coupled with editorial efforts to try sustaining a level of cohesion and accessibility across the whole set. While this was a particularly trying challenge for encyclopedia editors, the issue of increasing multitudes of books and expanding knowledge was relevant for a diversity of professionals such as librarians, bibliographers and lexicographers. 58 Belgian bibliographer Paul Otlet (1868-1944) was among the first to address the issue of organizing knowledge with a sensibility that would become increasingly familiar throughout the 20th century. A lawyer by profession, Otlet harbored a lifelong fascination with collecting and organizing knowledge. Rayward outlines Otlet’s primarily concerns with a series of questions (2): i. How best was order to be introduced into this proliferating, disorderly mass in such a way that progress in the world of learning could continue efficiently and effectively? ii. How could rapid developments in all areas of knowledge, so characteristic of modern period, be mobilized for the benefit of society? iii. How could the international flow of information, then obstructed (as it still is) by political, social and linguistic barriers on the one hand, and by cumbersome, unresponsive systems of publication, distribution and bibliographic processing on the other, become more open and more effective? iv. How could accurate, up-to-date, “integrated” information tailored specifically and exactly to particular needs be derived from this mass, re-worked to form ensuring immediate and optimal usefulness, and made available without hindrance or delay, whatever such potentially infinite, unpredictable needs might be. In his “Something about Bibliography”, originally published in 1891, Otlet attempted to address some of these questions with a radically new vision for the organization of information. According to Otlet, it is an almost impossible task to organize all the publications in print and make them available in an accessible form. To address this problem, Otlet argued, “various parts of any book can be reduced to different elements […] and a re-arrangement of contents not along the lines of the special plan of a particular book, but according to the genus and species appropriate to each element does not make for an loss of substance” (17). Underlying this ambitious proposal is Otlet’s belief that “the external make-up of a book, its format and the personality of its author are unimportant provided that its substance, its sources of information and its conclusions are preserved and can be made an integral part at the organization of knowledge” (ibid). Otlet envisioned the resulting compendium as an impersonal, collectively produced “artificial brain by means of cards containing actual information or simply notes of references” (ibid.). Otlet also noted that his proposed system of cards would have the added benefit of not being bound with alphabetical organization (18). 59 With such a scheme, Otlet aimed to create a compendium of knowledge where “any one person should be able to rapidly find out, not all about a subject, but all about the branches into which it has been divided and about the work already done relative to those branches” (19). Otlet’s desire to transcend the limitations imposed by print media and the other physical attributes of books are apparent in his proposals as is his willingness to embrace new technologies that might further his goal. Most practical applications of Otlet’s thinking found their manifestations with the help of index cards, although he was very interested in the possibilities offered by microphotography and other technical innovations. Otlet’s ideas culminated in the creation of the Mundaneum in 1910, co-founded with his lawyer colleague Henri La Fontaine and financially backed by the Belgian government. Based on a sanctioned adaptation of Dewey’s decimal system created by Otlet, called Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), the Mundaneum aimed to collect and organize the world’s information on a modular system of index cards. By reducing all the separate publications to their essence and combining them under a comprehensive system of classification, Otlet was striving to compile “the Source, the permanent Encyclopedia, the Summa [that] will replace chaos with a Cosmos” (Otlet, 1990,83). Based on his experiences with the Mundaneum, Otlet published “Transformations in the Bibliographical Apparatus of the Sciences” in 1918, in which
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